


Destroy, She Said

by lantadyme



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-08
Updated: 2012-03-08
Packaged: 2017-11-01 16:05:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,814
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/358706
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lantadyme/pseuds/lantadyme
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He made a direct threat to the strength and well being of her empire. She refuses to back down to that show of power.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Destroy, She Said

**Author's Note:**

> Takes place directly after [S] Prince of Heart: Rise Up.

There's nowhere to hide on Derse. She's made a point of it, sowing secret eyes and ears like seed to the winds, flies on every wall in all of Derse and thousands of spies to do her bidding. She's not a figurehead. She's not one Queen, isolated and bitter. She's the usurper, the invader, her fingers and her influence spread like corruption so thick through the entire machine of the government that it's impossible to remember how it was before. 

They say she has a psychic monster at her bidding. Whether that's true or not, the spies are her monster, everywhere and always listening, reporting, spreading the lies and the thoughts and the influences she wants to introduce into carapace society. The cities twist to her will.

The Prince had cast himself as savior. Awake, he'd paraded the Brute's severed head through the streets, brought the people together behind the chance that someone could stand up for their quietly drowning society. Her Imperious Condescension cast as the conqueror, a fish princess as the new head of state determined to sink them down slowly into the cold choking depths of her alien ocean. The masses that cannot sprout gills will surely die. 

With a wave of her hand, she sends a unit of elite soldiers to bring him in; the Prince ducked down into a secret room in a slum that he was errantly led to think was safe. He kills half of them. They break his nose and his ribs and cut him up in countless places before they take the sword out of his hand and clap him in irons. 

Now she stands on the balcony and watches as her team of soldiers brings him in to her, the people's errant savior bound and bloody and moments from being crushed under her heel. She smiles. Small shark teeth; a political predator forever in her element. For a slow hour, they take the long road and drag him limping through the streets, illustrating for the citizens exactly what happens to anyone foolish enough to stand up to the High Troll Queen. Shame is her tactic. It's potent and raw.

He comes into the pristine splendor of her throne room flanked by soldiers on all sides. Shackled with glittering purple cuffs, triumphant restraints to contrast the blood dried on his clothes and crusted over his mouth, the once-perfection of his dreaming outfit ripped and stained and ruined. He's a mess. She grins and grips the pike he'd used as his message in one hand. The end drips traces of the Brute's blood into the tyrian carpet.

"Hail the Prince of Heart!" she says with a sly smile. "For he has surely seen the city's spirit trampled in his defeat."

He says nothing. He stands with a knight on either side of him, his nose bleeding and his knuckles crushed and bloody, his face beaten black and blue. There is a long mean cut down his left arm, slick with red blood that sops into the purple of his sleeve. (She has learned not to underestimate by the color of a creature's blood. All the carapaces bleed red, even the most cunning and cutthroat.) His eyes burn with controlled rage, two orange embers in the pretty ruin of his face. They watch each other from opposite ends of the room, her on the throne and swathed in power, him crippled and broken beneath her. It feels wonderful.

A bishop comes forward from behind the line of knights and bows before the throne of his new queen, black shell shining in the firelight. In his hands is a dirty, bloody, messy prize—the Prince's sword wrenched from his grasp, fingers broken. Lounging comfortable in her throne, the Empress grips the pike in one hand and takes his sword in her other. She holds the blade to the light and watches the play of blood and grime and turmoil over the perfection of the steel, his weapon in her hand and his war against her leadership rendered impotent and laughable.

She stands, and in one fluid motion removes the dress sword from the filigreed gold scabbard lashed at her hip. She tosses it like trash into the shadow and sheaths his sword in its place. Her trophy. He will never get it back.

"And how will you wreck my shit now?" she asks with a cruel grin as she sits again, spearing this alien child on her gaze, the wisdom of a millennium behind her eyes.

"I'll find a way." His voice is dry as gravel. For a moment she watches him in silence, the power of his rage an obvious smoldering presence in the room. He's been shackled and beaten but he has yet to give up. In the set of his jaw is the determination to take down mountains, and Her Imperious Condescension is quite a mountain indeed.

She casts the bloody tip of the pike at the long window that shows the extent of her domain. "Why do you care about them?" In the plaza before her castle the people are milling about. Far fewer than the first time he'd visited and left a warning pinned at the top of the tower, but they are still there, standing in a mass to show her that they remember that they didn't always bow down to a foreign queen. They have been inspired to think of things higher than subjugation, and she will need to crush that out of them again. "What does Derse matter in your scheme of things?"

"It doesn't," he says carefully, hands balled over the purple chain that loops between the too-tight shackles on his wrists. "I don't care."

"You just wanted your precious co-players safe, yes? Well two of them are dead, Prince. Soon to be three, as we will inevitably locate your precious sister without you to shepherd her." She smiles wide, all the teeth in her mouth sharp and bared. "Did you really think you could outsmart the queen?"

"Fuck you," he bites out, the words quiet but dripping in venom. 

She's touched a nerve she didn't know was there, and it only makes her smile grow meaner. "Do you hate me, child?" she asks. "Why?"

"You're fucking up all my plans."

"That's not all though," she coaxes, brows raised. There's something familiar about him, about the way he doesn't cower at the very sight of her, the psychic presence that lingers at the edges of her. "Who are you, little Prince?"

"Your intelligence people are shit. My name is Dirk Strider. You killed my brother."

And suddenly it makes sense, the color of his hair, the determination in every inch of him, coiled and calculating and ready for action. She had never met Dave Strider in person, but she had definitely seen him—the stupid little human pawn who dared to dump infinite funding into a space program to thwart her back-door takeover of Earth's pathetic excuse for a unified government. 

She laughs. It's a slow, quiet thing at first, building up to a cackle that fills the vaulted rafters of the throne room. "That I did," she murmurs low and slow, savoring the words just as she'd savored them when she'd ordered the Dignitary to make the hit all those short human years ago. "And I hope it was painful as he bled out in that shabby hotel room. Perhaps I can arrange a similar ordeal for your death?"

He doesn't take the bait. He stands there trembling with rage, teeth bared in a snarl but never a foolish wasteful movement about him. He is calm and sturdy and ready for the first exploitable flaw in her defense that will come to him. 

He is all fire and brimstone, and for a moment she finds herself captivated by how useful he could be if she could break him and bend him to her will. It's sweet in her mouth like honey.

"Come forward, Prince of Heart." Her words are like poison. "Let us see what the fates have in store for you."

The knights at his side push him toward the throne. He nearly trips. His ankles are bound, a beautiful purple chain hissing against the shag of the carpet as he limps forward, death in his eyes. He's dangerous. She doesn't doubt for a moment that he will try to take this pike out of her hands and use it to cast an even stronger message—to spear it through her belly and bleed her dry. The smile never leaves her face. 

He stops at the foot of the throne. Red blood drips from his fingertips into her flawless carpet. She rests the pike almost casually against the back of her throne, a temptation to his scheming mind. Smiling, she sits forward, perching delicately on the edge of her seat to meet his furious eyes. 

Her teeth are razor sharp. "Give me your hand."

He spits at her. It lands bloody against her shoulder, and the Empress doesn't bat an eye. Her pretty ringed hand comes up and wipes his human filth from her beautiful seasilks. She stands and cracks him backhand across the face, his bad leg collapsing out from beneath him at the angle of the strike—this attempted threat on her empire reduced to a 15 year old boy kneeling before her, a shackled hand pressed shakily to the long jagged cut her ring has left across his cheekbone as he glares at her. 

"Very well," she tells him quietly, disappointed with his lack of tact. "Guards! Give me his hand."

She sits. The knights suddenly lurch forward to restrain him as he tries to wobble to his feet. They grip him by the shoulders and haul him to his knees, twisting and prying and fighting his snarling resistance until they have his bound wrists held out to her. 

And she smiles again, wide and cruel, as she forces his battered hand open and slides her fingers smoothly against his open palm.

"There are breaks in your lifeline, Prince," she tells him, his eyes scared and mistrusting and every inch of him angry. He's at her will and he knows it. She can kill him now if she wishes. But fate reaches farther than her petty little wills. She traces the lines in his palm, reading his future, and if there is anything she's learned in the depths of paradox space, it's that the future is relative. "So many directions you can go from here." 

She grins. His hand closes into a fist again as she lets him go. 

He's a malleable little minnow. If she plays her cards right, she knows exactly where he will go. 

"I think I'll choose," she tells him, and presses a kiss to his bloody bruised knuckles before she has the knights drag him away to the dungeon.


End file.
